Hamlet The village building game & Sentinels of the Multiverse

 

So, another board game night. This time we tried out Hamlet, prior to playing our usual Sentinels of the Multiverse game. I have a lot to say about Hamlet, but I am not certain that I want to waste that much time on this game, as I already wasted enough time playing the game. One thing I can say is that at least it was better than Darkest Night! 

You may sense that I did not entirely enjoy this game. To be fair a lot of my dislike of the game comes from what the game is; it is a worker placement/engine building game. We have tried other games of this type that, while I did not dislike them as much as this game, they were certainly not games that I really need to play again. 

That said I know there are many who enjoy this type of game and it is my understanding after reading some reviews, is that this game is good. I will say that both of us found the rule book was lacking in details and therefore the learning curve was slower than it should have been. The idea that this game takes 25 minutes per player to play is ludicrous. Once we got the hang of it there still was no way that the game was going to end after another 50 minutes. The game ends when the church is built but there is not enough incentive to meet this end of game condition. For some players it is far easier and more fun to gather victory points by other means. True this depends on the players playing the game but like Terraforming Mars it only takes one player to derail this process. 

The tiles have very nice detailed drawings, but it can be challenging to see the information on the tiles. The tiles are a variety of shapes, some quite odd. Tiles are drawn from a bag when ever you need to restock the available 'blueprints'. I kind of think that clever gamers might just figure out which shapes might be better to draw and which ones that you might want to leave in the bag for later.

At any rate we were both happy to have given the game a try, but neither of us were enamored of it. It felt like a slow slog to get things done and when one player gets a second helper, and if they have that advantage for even a few turns, then they can get a real leg up on the engine making and VP gathering that the other player is then doomed with limited chance to catch up.

We also played Sentinels of the Multiverse. I went with Writhe and Omnitron X, while across from me was Skyscraper and Harpy. We went up against Apostate in the Insula Primalis. We have had challenges with this villain before and all his relics, but this time we were able to put him down relatively quickly. It was a nice ending to the night, not just because we won, but because the game was simply a fun time.